Gender and quality television

Abstract

American television programs have long been perceived as instruments of media imperialism and a threat to local cultures. This essay argues that the global proliferation of so-called “quality” shows in the last few decades also presents a challenge and opportunity for a transnational understanding of feminism and postfeminism. Television scholars have argued that the turn towards “quality” in both television studies and the television industry requires “remasculinizing” the medium by disavowing its “feminine,” melodramatic aesthetic and feminism's fundamental contribution to television studies. When these series travel outside the Anglo-American context of television studies, however, their gendered dimension is rearticulated and incorporated in local cultures in often radically different ways. After comparing definitions of televisual quality in the United States and (Western) Europe, the argument tracks the reception of the Fox series House M.D. and HBO's Sex in the City in postsocialist Eastern European cultures. While several American “quality” shows have recently broken through the local high cultural disdain for television by virtue of their cinematic aesthetic and unprecedented popularity, House's masculine aesthetic and ideological appeal has mobilized localization strategies on a national scale. Conversely, Sex in the City, similar to other postfeminist dramas, tends to be processed in fan communities isolated from both the national public sphere and local feminist discussions. Its limited, consumerist incorporation problematizes western definitions of postfeminist media culture, which take for granted the achievements of feminism and a serious attention to popular culture.

Keywords:

• quality television
• postsocialism
• postfeminism
• House M.D.
• Sex and the City

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Stephanie Wooten for valuable research, ideas, and discussions which inspired and shaped this essay. A brief extract from an early version of this paper was published under the title “Sex and the Postsocialist City” (Imre 2009b).

Notes

1. “The Ends of Television” conference, held in Amsterdam, June 27–July 1, 2009.

2. In reality, the creative license that distinguishes HBO from network television is most evident in the sexually explicit and violent language and visual content that the more deregulated cable industry is allowed to display. This raises the question whether the appeal to more respectable art forms is used primarily to sell transgressive content (McCabe & Akass 2007b, p. 75).

3. Some of the numerous fan sites in the region are Hugh Laurie Heaven (n.d.), http://www.series.qportal.hu, http://www7.online.rtlklub.hu, http://www.libidecuki.try.hu, House M.D. (n.d.), http://www.house-md.pl/en/tag/subtitles/; KultHIT.de (n.d.), and TV Fan Romania (n.d.).

4. I am grateful to Alice Bardan for this information.

5. I am grateful to Katarzyna Marciniak for this information.

6. http://www.pasipotlo-parna.hu/info.html.

7. A collection of Hungarian- and English-language Sex in the City fan sites: http://szexesnewyork.lap.hu/.

8. Most prominently, http://www.tusarok.org/; http://feminarium.blogter.hu/.

9. “Innen nézve, ha a nők mégis tevékeny részesei kívánnak lenni az új politikai rend kiépítésének, számukra az egyetlen cselekvő pozíció a neokonzervatív posztfeminizmusé lehet csupán. Azaz a cselekvő tenni akarás jegyében közreműködhetnek egykori relatív előnyeik (például a bölcsődei ellátás) lebontásában—az ismét megtalált ‘nőies nő’ eszménye jegyében, aki elsősorban anya, akinek fel sem tűnhet, hogy a ‘karrier vagy család’ eleve kirekesztő választás” (Barát, Pataki & Pócs 2004).

“If women wish to participate in building the new political order, the only active position left to them is that of neoconservative postfeminism. That is, they may actively cooperate in doing away with their previous, relative advantages (free preschools, for instance)—working towards the recovered ideal of the ‘feminine woman,’ who is a mother in the first place, and who is not supposed to notice that ‘career or family’ is already a choice that excludes” (my translation).